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CLANDON BARROW

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Description

DESCRIPTION

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A bowl barrow situated on a chalk ridge, overlooking the Frome Valley to the north. The barrow, which is known as the Clandon Barrow, has a mound composed of earth, chalk and flint with maximum dimensions of 30 metres in diameter and circa 3 metres in height. The mound is surrounded by a ditch from which material was quarried during the construction of the monument. This is no longer visible, having become infilled over the years, but it will survive as a buried feature circa 3 metres wide. The barrow was partly excavated by Cunnington in 1882, when a cremation burial within an urn, a copper dagger, shale mace head, bronze ring and gold plate were all recovered. The excavations did not extend to the primary burial. The finds from the excavation are now held in the Dorset County Museum. Scheduled.

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MORE INFORMATION & SOURCES

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(SY 65638900) Clandon Barrow (NR) (1)

Clandon Barrow, of bowl type (SY 65648900) - in prominent position
above 300 ft. contour on flat ground at W. end of local ridge.
Diam. 90 ft., ht. 18 ft. Markedly conical in profile. Cunnington
partly excavated the mound in 1882 without reaching primary burial,
and bottom of his pit being probably 9 ft. above original ground
surface. About 6 ft. from the top was flint cairn about 1 ft. thick
and 8 ft. in diam. Below it, sherds of an incense cup were scattered
on a layer of white clay; among the flints were fragments of an
amber cup; and on the flints were a grooved copper dagger with
traces of a wooden sheath and an attached small bronze ring, a
quadrangular gold plate and a shale mace-head with five gold-capped
bosses. 1 ft. higher was a cremation in a crushed, typologically
early, collared urn on a thin layer of ashes and small flints.
4 ft. higher and 2 ft. from the top of the mound two stone-lined
graves, possibly Romano-British, lay E.-W. 4 ft. apart, each with
an inhumation on a layer of fine sand. The mound largely consisted
of layers of sands, clays and gravels.
Finds in Dorset County Museum. (2-3)

SY 65638900. Clandon Barrow, (name not confirmed), lies in arable.
It is very steep sided, and although not ploughed over it has been
damaged by ploughing at the edges. Diameter 30.0m, height 5.5m,
with a flat top of 5.0m diameter: there is no visible ditch.

Re-surveyed at 1:2500 on MSD. (4)

Clandon Barrow, Winterbourne St Martin 31. Of the finds from the
excavation (Authy 2 and 3) some of which comprise a 'Wessex' I
grave group, the macehead is of jet, the grooved bronze dagger is
Gerloff's Amorico-British B (Cressingham type), the collared urn
is Primary Series and the 'incense-cup' is a bipartite accessory
vessel. (5)

SY 656890 (SY 68 NE 23) and SY 665894 (SY 68 NE 26). Two round
barrows on Clandon Farm. Scheduled. (6-8)

The assemblage of material from the barrow is reinterpretted in the wider Atlantic and European context. The assemblage possibly represents a much deeper religious significance for the site than had hitherto been recognised. (9)

SOURCE TEXT

( 1) Ordnance Survey Map (Scale / Date)

6" 1963

( 2) Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England) 1970 An inventory of historical monuments in the County of Dorset. Volume two : south-east [in three parts]

Part 3 Page(s)471

( 3) by L V Grinsell 1959 Dorset barrows

Page(s)152

( 4) Field Investigators Comments

F1 JGB 21-MAY-80

( 5a) Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society

27 (1961) Page(s)263-306

( 5b) by Sabine Gerloff 1975 The Early Bronze Age daggers in Great Britain and a reconsideration of the Wessex Culture

Prhistorische Bronzefunde Abt.6, Bd.2

( 5) by L V Grinsell 1982 Dorset barrows supplement

Page(s)4, 17-19, 56

( 6) by Department of the Environment, Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings London 1978 List of ancient monuments in England: Volume 1, Northern England; Volume 2, Southern England; Volume 3, East Anglia and the Midlands

2 Page(s)74

( 7) General reference

DOE Inspectorate of Ancient Monument Record Form July 1957

(8) Scheduled Monument Notification

11/07/1997

(9) Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society

74, 2008 Page(s)1-52

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